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Helping customers find the right products quickly is crucial to running a successful ecommerce website. Therefore, product searching deserves attention to its performance. Odoo, a batteries included solution to managing enterpries, comes with its own off-the-shelf search functionality. It works out of the box with reasonable speed for small inventory. For larger product collection, it leaves something to be desired. In this post, we are looking at how Odoo is implementing its search function and possible methods to speed it up.

Joining tables in SQL is costly. Consider a database in which we store survey question templates. The normalized way would be to have a template table and a question table, with each question having a foreign key to the template that owns it. So whenever there is a need to render a survey, Odoo would need to query database twice, once for the template table and once for the question table. Sometimes, instead of the usual one to many relationship, we can optimize for read operations by lumping all related records into a json text field. The approach would suffer from low write throughput due to the need to lock the template table just to add a question. In reality, survey template is normally created once and read many times, that does not sound too bad a trade off. So in this post, we will look into rendering a json field as tree view in Odoo.

In other post, about create react UI with Odoo, we discussed building a custom UI page for Odoo module. That approach has the advantage of being flexible, though it may feel foreign to the whole Odoo’s experience. Odoo, after all, presents itself as an integrated all-in-one platform. It would be better if our module sits in Odoo’s native view, i.e under the Odoo usual navigation bar.

Odoo is a powerful workhorse that comes with a ton of functionalities built-in. That sometimes comes at a cost of bloated code with more functionalities than needed. For example, the common javascript bundle web.assets_common.js is pretty large (about 1MB), including anything from jQuery, Bootstrap to QWeb. If our aim is to create an independent front-end client with a UI framework of choice, say React, why bother including all that. So in this post, we will be trying to create a very thin api client to Odoo’s backend.

Odoo add-on allows very flexible customization. For most custom modules, adding an form view or table view to admin page is enough. However sometimes the custom module may need to create an entirely different UI layout (think Gantt chart, custom dashboard…). In this post, we are going through the steps required to add a non-standard interface to Odoo, a single page React based To-do app. The purpose is, in other words, to create a scaffold for standalone screen similar to that of the point-of-sale module.

Odoo web client default framework is based on a combination of jQuery and BackboneJS. Now, jQuery is old but it is not necessary worse. Technologies serve its purpose as long as it works and meet requirements. However, there is cases when non-product requirements need to be considered such as when your development team is heavily invested on, say ReactJs, and productivity can be greatly improved when the familiar toolset is available. Needless to say, productivity means cost saving. Thus, this post quickly looks into necessary steps to integrate Babel transpiler with Odoo’s asset bundling.